‘Dune’s Guild Heighliner: The Best Ship For Shipping Ships That Themselves Ship Ships
The Spacing Guild maintains a monopoly on all interstellar travel in the known universe. At the heart of their power? The Guild Heighliner.
Guild Heighliners were the epitome of the Spacing Guild’s transportation. These massive cargo carriers could tuck away all the frigates and transports of one of the Great Houses of the Landsraad in a tiny corner of its cavernous holds. An entire planet might be little more than a blip on the ship’s manifest.
So complicated and vast were these ships, that special laws were enacted throughout the Imperium to govern travel aboard the vessel. A Guild Heighliner was a neutral space. No House dared break the pact of neutrality, lest they lose the ability to travel between stars. For it was Guild Heighliners, and Heighliners alone who could navigate the twisting paths of folded space to travel instantaneously across great distances.
Guild Heighliner – Design and Capabilities
Heighliners were the symbol of the Spacing Guild’s power. These ships were truly enormous. A single Heighliner could be well in excess of 20 kilometers long. They were taller than the mountains. But they needed to be to fulfill their role as the Spacing Guild’s primary means of transportation. While the Guild had smaller ships, Heighliners performed the majority of the Guild’s carrying service.
Each Guild Heighliner was outfitted with a Holtzman Drive. These special drive engines utilize the Holtzman effect, which powers Shields and other technologies, to instantaneously travel across space without actually seeming to move. But this is because the vessels actually fold space.
There is some debate as to whether the Spacing Guild and their prescient Navigators, simply fold the space itself, or use their powers of prescience to navigate the non-deterministic, chaotic nature of “foldspace” by finding safe paths. Most hold that Navigators are plotting a course, but the Spacing Guild is notoriously secretive.
A Third-Stage Guild Navigator
It would be impossible to talk about the Heighliners without at least mentioning Guild Navigators. Navigators are humans who have evolved, or mutated, depending on your perspective, via the consumption of massive amounts of the Spice Melange. These Navigators develop a limited form of prescience which allows them to navigate foldspace, crossing distance and time.
But each Navigator is expensive. They require enormous quantities of Spice in order to develop. And more still to consume. They are immersed in concentrations of Orange Spice gas. Their bodies atrophy over time, with their heads and extremities enlarging. Some say they resemble nothing so much as a human who has evolved into an aquatic being.
As the Melange affects their bodies, Navigators first develop blue within blue eyes, then over the years their hands develop fanned membranes, their mouths and noses shrink while their temples pulse with the ululation of time and space itself.
Navigators are so secretive that few, even among the Spacing Guild, have ever seen one.
A History of Guild Heighliners
The first Heighliner was built more than ten thousand years before Paul Atreides ever set foot on Arrakis. They were developed during the Butlerian Jihad when humanity was engaged in a war with “thinking machines” of all sorts, whether computers, humanoid robots, or otherwise. This upheaval was meant to free humanity from under the thumb of sentient machines.
Whatever the ultimate cause of the war, it was during these events that Norma Cenva, mistress of Aurelius Venport, came up with the design of the Guild Heighliner. They helped humanity during the conflict, and in subsequent millennia, the ships were manufactured on the planet Ix, where all cutting-edge technology is produced.
They played a key role in the events known as “the Arrakis Affair” when Guild Heighliners brought House Atreides to the desert planet to take over from the villainous Harkonnen. However, they also brought the Imperium’s forces, legions of Sardaukar lent to support Harkonnen forces, to Arrakis to betray the Atreides, whom Navigators foresaw as a threat to spice production.
And indeed, Atreides proved to be a dire threat to the Spice. For who can destroy a thing can control a thing.
